All About Plants

If you're not a microbe and you're not an animal, you are probably a plant. There are about 300 thousand known species of plants. Because plants adapt so well to almost any climate, scientists needed a way to organize the hundreds of thousands of species.

I had some success with my 10 most interesting animals hub, and so I decided I should do plants too. After all, plants have a reputation for being motionless and boring. These 20 plants challenge the mundane stereotype that plagues their kingdom. (Okay, technically some are fungi, so I cheated a little.)

Plants that eat rats, slimy alien-looking fungi, leaves that dance all by themselves and flowers that smell like the rotting corpse of a horse: all of these wonders of nature are among the most rare, exotic and unusual plant species in the world.

Codariocalyx motorius - formerly Desmodium gyrans. These guys constantly move their leaves searching for the best light. It's quick enough to watch directly but this was shot with an interval of two seconds on the D3100. The seeds were from http://www.jungleseeds.co.uk